noise. Then he turned and stepped into the road. Ellis, surprised, hesitated, and the air pulsed with the passage of the SUV that struck Boggs and carried him away.
Boggs flipped over the hood, bounced off the windshield and roof, and turned heels over head, limbs outstretched, as the SUV passed below. He came down on his shoulder with his head bent strangely while the SUV continued ahead a hundred feet before the brakes locked the tyres and they began to cry and the SUV spun in the roadway. A semi travelling behind it had time and space to slow and stop. Traffic began to back up. Ellis stared, waiting for something more to happen – it seemed something more must happen. Time passed, and he thought, I should understand this now. Someone was shouting. Nothing happened except that people shouted and traffic accumulated in a long idling column behind the stopped semi. He went slowly toward Boggs, already sure that Boggs was dead.
PART FIVE: THE RECONSTRUCTION
12.
THE ROOM – SMALL, oddly shaped, poorly lit – lay at the end of a cul-de-sac hallway, at the place where an older hospital building had been mated to a newer addition, the room itself a structural afterthought formed by opening some space off the side of a storage closet. It had several corners, one narrow window, and provided barely sufficient floor space for a few pieces of equipment, two chairs and a single bed. On the ceiling a fluorescent light box flickered. ‘They brought me back to life and then what? Then they put me into a tomb,’ complained James Dell, his voice a croak. He sipped from a plastic cup and water overspilled his lips and flowed onto his green hospital gown, where he batted at it. Pale and brightly scarred, he lay in collapse, a pair of eyeglasses with thick black frames owling his eyes.
Ellis had come here in a state of exhaustion that left him stumbling and half blind, fearful that James would despise him, that James would refuse him. But James seemed hardly aware of him. Instead he worried aloud about money, and because of money he wanted to leave the hospital. His wife said he couldn’t leave. He said it was a free country. Mrs Dell said the doctors said he shouldn’t leave. He tried to get out of bed but fell back with a shriek and moaned. He said she should help him. She glowered and said she would not help him to act like an idiot. He said he would soon be broke. She said he had no choice. He said he would be broke and would soon live under a bridge and cook rats for dinner over a barrel fire. She said he had never cooked a thing in his life. He said she should have let him die rather than be bankrupted into a life of homelessness and rat-eating and could she move the pillow under his leg nearer to the knee? Which she did. But on and on they argued, with loud indifference to anyone who might be listening.
Their volume rose and fell; James’s strength was inconsistent. Ellis sat in the corner in one of the plastic chairs. Now that he was here, he had little sense of reason or purpose. He recalled the collapse of James Dell onto the hood and the patter of glass against his own face – and now he sat beside James Dell’s bed and James Dell complained that there were too many commercials on and changed the channel and Mrs Dell hounded him to change it back and leave it, please. Meanwhile the light in the little window over the bed brightened and faded with the passage of unseen clouds.
Eventually Ellis excused himself to go to the bathroom. When he’d finished he considered walking out of the hospital and driving away. But he wanted to watch one more time the opening and closing of James’s eyes, the life of his thin limbs, the sneering of his lips.
James lay alone in the room, holding up a hand and staring at it.
Ellis said, ‘I wish I could do more than say I’m sorry.’
‘Sir.’ James grimaced. ‘If you apologise again, I’ll have them throw you out.’
Ellis sat. The overhead light flashed. A passing bed rattled in the hallway.
‘I shouldn’t have crossed there,’ James said.
‘I shouldn’t have tried to pass on the right.’
‘I’ve passed on the right a thousand times.’ James’s voice guttered with self-disgust. ‘Nothing wrong with it.’
Ellis hesitated, feeling he should apologise, afraid to apologise.
‘She went out for some lunch,’ James said. ‘The bitch.’
‘She was here all the time that you were in the coma.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘It was very hard for her, her husband -’
‘I’m not her husband. She’s not my wife.’
‘She isn’t?’
‘Ex. We were unmarried eight and a half years ago. She can go any time she wants. I don’t love her.’ He wound his sheet on his finger. ‘I wish I did. It would be something.’
Then he sat forward with a jerk and looked around. He complained that she had been away too long and she was spending money on lunch when she could have just as easily eaten off the tray of food that the hospital gave him.
A short, cushiony nurse came in to fret over the machines.
Ellis rose and excused himself.
He drove to Heather’s house. In the street before it he slowed the minivan to a crawl and remembered years before, passing by here in naivety and embarrassment, while Boggs waved from the garage, and it roused a sensation that he could not name but it was excruciating. A car came close behind him, and he accelerated away. Then through a route of miles he turned and turned back, slowed, turned into the drive, let the minivan idle down its length. He stood a minute in the driveway. The garage was closed, the windows dark. The grass of the lawn had grown long. Black clouds were heaving up out of the west.
He reached for the doorbell, but then tried the knob instead, and at his touch the door opened. He stood looking in at the darkened living room. ‘Heather?’ he called, softly. The walls were worked with innumerable bright colours – images in crayon, watercolour, construction paper, cellophane, papier mache, stickers, marker, glued buttons, seashells, bottle caps – pieces of art that her students had given her or had simply abandoned. Some of it she had framed and some of it was stuck up with thumbtacks, so that they filled the walls from floor to ceiling with stick figures, mountains, houses, flowers, monster trucks, rainbows and various abstractions and images so crude as to be effectively abstract. Their initial effect could be overwhelming, but he had seen them a couple of times before when he picked up Boggs for work trips, and he looked at them now only to try to detect whether anything had changed. All over the floor lay many objects, scattered or assembled in piles – pens, coffee mugs, silverware, magazines, drink coasters, a tube of Crest, sheets, a bar of soap, telephone books, wire hangers, a TV remote. He studied these things for a while, but could make no sense of them, and then toed through to the kitchen, which stood empty, the shades drawn, the refrigerator whirring, a single light under a cabinet illuminating a tub of sugar and a set of knives mounted to the wall on magnets so that they appeared to float.
The windowless stairwell was particularly dark. He hung onto the banister as he went up. Then the top step lay underfoot and the guest bedroom stood open and empty, the bed squarely made and desolate. The door of the master bedroom stood ajar and swung under his hand. The shades drawn, the room lay in dim grey illumination, its objects defined by shadows. After a while he could see Heather asleep in the bed. He felt he could hardly breathe and feared he would inadvertently gasp or cry out. For minutes he stood. Then he moved into the room, aware of the sounds he made – the brushing of the creases of his clothing, the crackling press of his feet into the carpet, the tiny grinding of his joints. He stood beside the bed, then eased down until he kneeled on the carpet. She slept on her stomach, her head turned so that the right side of her face pressed into the pillow, exposing the scar on the left side. Her hair spread wild. Her lashless eyelids appeared frail and naked as an infant’s, but her face was lined in a way that made her seem tired even as she slept. He reached toward her, but stopped short. The bed sheets were twisted tight around her. Laundry sprawled at the foot of the bed, and a half-dozen coffee mugs crowded the bedside table.
He was glad to watch her sleep and feared that when she woke she would send him away, because he had not saved Boggs, because he had killed Boggs, because he had left her for so long, because he had not called, because
